Letty smiled at her: “Why don’t we talk about that later. When we talk to your man, let me talk to him, too. Let me be his sister, Joan. I need to get a head count and . . . pass the word along.”
The woman gave her a long look and nodded.
* * *
Fifteen Customs and Border Protection employees were sitting on chairs or on the floor on one side of an open room, facing three militiamen with guns. Letty went with the pregnant woman, whose name was Alice, and whose husband’s name was Parker. Parker stood up and kissed Alice and as they stepped apart, Alice said, in a whisper, “This is your sister, Joan. She’s . . . with somebody.”
With all the women talking to their husbands at once, the conversational noise level had gotten high. Parker looked around and then said, quietly, to Letty, “You’re too young to be with somebody.”
“But I am—I’m an investigator with DHS, out of Washington. I can talk to some outside people every once in a while, police, military.”
Parker nodded and said, “We’re all okay in here. Something awful might happen, though. They’ve got all those guns on the bridge and we’ve heard them talking about the caravan. It isn’t stopping, it’s still coming on.”
“They’re not doing anything out in town,” Alice said. “The kids are with Gabriela, they’re fine. You don’t be doing anything brave that gets you shot.”
One of the militiamen had stepped toward them, overheard that, smiled and said, “He’s doing fine. Couple more hours and we’ll be all done.”
Another militiaman overheard that comment and said, irritated, “Hey . . . Reg . . .”
“Oops. Sorry,” Reg said.
Letty thought, Really? A couple of hours?
In the continued gabbling of talk around them, Letty asked Parker, “Any hint they’re going to hurt any of you guys?”
He shook his head: “No. They seem to think we’re more or less on their side.”
“Are you?”
“Fuck no. But we’re being nice,” Parker said.
“Do you have any access to weapons? Any hidden weapons?”
“They took them all,” Parker said. “They were all over us, they body-searched us.”
“Would you want one?”
He stared at her for a moment, then said, “Not right now . . .”
Letty nodded toward the windows at the far end of the room. “If things get . . . desperate . . . in here, if you think they’re going to start killing you guys, get three guys and all of you line up and lean against those windows. Put your shoulders right against the glass. We’ll try to help.”
“Who’s ‘we’？”
Before Letty could answer, a militiaman near the door shouted, “Okay, that’s all. Let’s get you ladies out of here.”
Alice and Letty both gave Parker a hug, and they went back outside and rejoined the crowd. Hawkes was walking away from the TV truck and called to Low and the nurses, “They’re saying ten or twelve minutes.”
Alice asked, quietly, “Are you DHS? Really?”
Letty smiled and patted her on the arm. “There’s a bumper sticker I saw in El Paso; it said, heavily armed and easily pissed. That’s more or less me.”
* * *
Letty lingered with the crowd. Ten minutes later, she heard the helicopter coming in, and the nearby militia pressed down to the bridge. Rodriguez and Ochoa went down with them, working remotely from the truck, recording the evacuation scene. As people shuffled around to watch the helicopter come in, Letty joined the group near the bridge, edging closer to Ochoa.